Jim Valvano

In recent years, the name of the arena the New Jersey Nets call home has been changed from Brendan Byrne to The Meadowlands. More appropriate would be "The Asylum."The chaos created on the court by the team's ill-fitting collection of players is matched by the bedlam in the Nets boardroom, where the seven owners constantly bicker over who's in charge and pass on their confusion to general manager Willis Reed and head coach Bill Fitch, who reads every day in the New York tabloids that his job will end after Christmas.

Athletes typically are big people, but there wasn't a large one among the four inducted yesterday in the Maryland Sports Hall of Fame. The tallest was 5 feet 9.When ex-Orioles pitcher Tom Phoebus stood up to be enshrined, people in the audience at Martin's West were almost shocked at his stature.Phoebus is 5-8. He weighed 185 when he played for the O's. But that was big enough to win 43 games in the '67, '68 and '69 seasons and to pitch a no-hitter in '68.Lefty Stern is a legendary amateur athlete from the '20s and '30s who could play any sport well, as emcee Vince Bagli put it "almost a Jim Thorpe of Maryland athletics."

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - The story of Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school team as a sophomore has been well documented. Not so many know the same thing happened to Clyde Drexler. "They threw me out of the gym," Drexler said yesterday at the Basketball Hall of Fame. "I was terrible. It was a wake-up call. It let me know that only the best players are going to make the team." Drexler did make the team the next year. Clyde "The Glide" went on to play for the University of Houston's high-flying Phi Slamma Jamma team with Hakeem Olajuwon, then for 15 years in the NBA with the Portland Trail Blazers and Houston Rockets.

TOWSON -- Three subcommittees of the Baltimore County school system's Acts and Threats of Violence Task Force are scheduled to meet tomorrow.The task force was formed this summer in response to recent violent incidents in schools, and it is scheduled to report its findings to the superintendent by Oct. 15.Meeting tomorrow are two panels examining incidents and their aftermath. A third panel, which will study conditions before the incidents, meets Friday. All meetings are open to the public and will begin at 3 p.m. in the Greenwood Administration Building, 6901 Charles St.Police to lead campaign for United Way in countyTOWSONTOWSON -- The county police will lead the Baltimore County government's 1998 United Way Communitywide Campaign, officials said last week.

Give PBS points for timeliness in airing "Sports for Sale" tonight -- smack in the middle of "March Madness," NCAA basketball tournament time."Sports for Sale" is a 90-minute documentary with Bill Moyers about the madness, badness and business of college sports and what Moyers calls the "myth of the student-athlete." It airs at 9 on MPT (Channels 22 and 67).The report says some things that have needed to be said for a long time.Moyers asks, for example, what kind of message ABC and ESPN are sending students with the case of basketball coach Jim Valvano.

La Salle was there at the start of the East Coast Conference, as were Temple, St. Joseph's and American. Later migrations took Bucknell, Lafayette and Lehigh, and then Delaware and Drexel. The most recent movement in the never-ending realignment of Division I athletics has the ECC's days dwindling down to a precious few.The ECC opened for business in 1974 as a basketball coaches' conference, with Gary Williams, Paul Westhead, Tom Davis, Jim Valvano, Don Casey and Joe Harrington roaming the sidelines.

THE FOREVER BOYS.Peter Golenbock.Birch Lane Press.391 pages. $19.95.There are a few things to say in praise of Peter Golenbock'sports books and I will say them in a paragraph. They're provocative. They sell lots of copies. They do not fill the bookshelves at the home of Jim Valvano, whose job as North Carolina State basketball coach vanished after Mr. Golenbockalleged two or three thousand improprieties in "Personal Fouls."Now that that's out of the way, here's the problem: Mr. Golenbock isn't a careful reporter.

The message has gone out to the Lords of Baseball that the game needs to broaden its appeal and take in more youth. Apparently, Fox, the sport's new telecaster, took that message to heart and applied it to its announcing crew.The network announced yesterday that it has hired Joe Buck, Thom Brennaman and Chip Caray as three of its play-by-play announcers for its package of weekly Saturday afternoon games, which launches June 1.All three of the new hires are relative pups in the broadcasting industry, and each man is the next generation in a family with an impressive history in sports announcing.

After the Washington Bullets' 101-97 victory over the Boston Celtics on Tuesday, Celtics forward Xavier McDaniel paid Bullets rookie Tom Gugliotta the ultimate compliment."

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Once this was his fiefdom, his basketball program, his stage. But in 1990 he was forced to resign amid ongoing evidence of academic and other irregularities, and he had not been back since.Yesterday afternoon, Jim Valvano finally returned to Reynolds Coliseum, overcoming the ravages of bone cancer and the passage of time to again cast his spell over North Carolina State basketball.The occasion was a 10th anniversary salute to N.C. State's 1983 national championship team, which defeated a heavily favored Houston team led by Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon in the title game.